Follow Him: A Come, Follow Me Podcast - What can we learn from the people in Matthew 1 & Luke 1? • followHIM Favorites • Jan. 2 - Jan. 8

Episode Date: December 29, 2022

Hank Smith and John Bytheway answer a question from this week's Come, Follow Me study.Show Notes (English, French, Spanish, Portuguese): https://followhim.coFacebook: https://www.facebook.com/followhimpodcastInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/followhimpodcastYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/FollowHimOfficialChannelThanks to the followHIM team:Steve & Shannon Sorensen: Executive Producers, SponsorsDavid & Verla Sorensen: SponsorsDr. Hank Smith: Co-hostJohn Bytheway: Co-hostDavid Perry: ProducerKyle Nelson: Marketing, SponsorLisa Spice: Client Relations, Editor, Show NotesJamie Neilson: Social Media, Graphic DesignWill Stoughton: Video EditorKrystal Roberts: Translation Team, English & French Transcripts, WebsiteAriel Cuadra: Spanish TranscriptsIgor Willians: Portuguese Transcripts"Let Zion in Her Beauty Rise" by Marshall McDonaldhttps://www.marshallmcdonaldmusic.com/products/let-zion-in-her-beauty-rise-piano

Hello, my friends. Welcome to another Follow Him favorites. John and I are taking a part of this week's lesson, which is Matthew chapter 1 and Luke chapter 1, and just talking about a tiny portion of it. John, we've got all sorts of people listed in Matthew 1 and Luke 1 from Abraham to David to Joseph and Mary and Elizabeth and Zacharias and then you go to the rest of the Christmas story and you've got shepherds and angels and herod and wise men. What do you take from all these characters? Is there any of them

that stand out to you? One fun way to look at it whenever you see a name in the scriptures is to ask yourself, is this person an example? Like, I want to be like that, or is this person a warning? I don't want to be like that. And boy, do we have some contrasts here. We've got Joseph, who the angel, Lord, visits him in a dream. We've got Herod, who was so wicked. And sometimes when there's not a whole lot of doctrine being taught, we can look at the examples of the people and say, which one of those do I admire, which ones do I own avoid? I mean, I've heard you talk about Herod before and Joseph and what a contrast those two are in their personal character. Matthew put them side by side and here you've got Joseph who is very responsive to dreams,

very responsive to promptings. And the one thing that I've noticed about Joseph is that he's slow to act in emotion. He finds out that his fiance is pregnant and it says, he's a just man. He doesn't want to make her a public example. He wants to maybe end this privately, to divorce her privately. Then while he thought on these things,

behold the angel of the Lord appeared unto him. So there's something to be said about not being governed, not having kind of a knee-jerk reaction to something, but to be slow and calm and deliberate, where Herod just seems to be governed by his emotions in every aspect of his life. He's governed by jealousies, governed by his insecurities. We don't get to talk much about Joseph.

We talk about Jesus and we talk about his mother, but it's nice for us to say, what's the example of Joseph for us in this chapter? Yeah, I remember Elder Holland giving a talk about things we could think about during the sacrament. My mom used to say, think about Jesus when I was a kid during the sacrament. Yeah. He gave this talk about always remembering. And he used to say, think about Jesus during the sacrament. He gave this talk

about always remembering. He just made a little comment about Joseph that I've never forgotten. He said, Joseph is a reminder that plain, unpretentious people have pushed this work forward from the beginning, and that if you feel you're serving almost anonymously, so did one of the best men who ever lived. And that was Joseph. So that's a good way we can think of, you know, we don't know much about Joseph, but just like you said, he was slow to respond. He was trying to protect Mary by not embarrassing her in public with something he didn't understand and the Lord gave him understanding about it.

And he was open to the Holy Ghost. He was open to these promptings of the Spirit. So I'd like to let's say Joseph is a great example of someone in the scriptures this week. You can say, you know what? How can I be more Joseph-like? How can I walk away from this chapter being more Joseph-like? We hope you'll join us on our full podcast. It's called Follow Him. You can get it wherever you get your podcasts. And then come back next week and join us for another Follow Him favorites. you